Philip Larkin's tombstone gives only his name, his dates (1922-1985) and the word 'Writer'. His companion, Monica Jones, insisted that 'he wasn't just a poet. He lived a writer's life'. In his lifetime, we had four books of poems, one of jazz criticism, one of miscellaneous pieces and two novels; this book gives us almost all the rest of the prose he published.

It manages to be at once delightful and entirely unsurprising. The public persona Larkin created for himself was immaculately consistent and the work gathered here acts as a set of variations on the central theme. We begin with a series of 'Statements and Interviews', in which Larkin rehearses familiar positions. The most interesting is the 1959 essay 'Not the Place's Fault'. Larkin left this out of Required Writing (1983) because he felt he had given too much away.

Well, he reveals that in childhood 'I once went to bed in the middle of the celebration of my own birthday', and that 'I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing'. This doesn't seem much: more interesting is his reference to his father's liking for 'Teutonic and Scandinavian areas' for holidays.

In his biography of Larkin (1993), Andrew Motion shows that the two trips Larkin and his father made to Germany in the late Thirties left him with feelings about 'abroad' which 'as the years went by he simplified and hardened into "hatred".' The trouble was that Sydney Larkin was in effect a Nazi. A Hitler toy stood on the family mantelpiece. As late as 1942, Larkin boasts in a letter that he has persuaded a landlady to agree that Hitler's Germany could have been 'the finest country in the world'. In 1943, he described himself as 'fundamentally... uninterested in the war', a stance he preserved to the war's end. He escaped service, to his relief, on medical grounds.

The absence of the central experience of his generation from Larkin's work is disquieting. Equally, 'Teutonic... areas' dodges 'Germany'. However, if we understand that a deliberate repression was involved, not just myopia, we can see how crucial his later clinging to an idea of Englishness was for his dealings with himself.

That idea is celebrated again and again in the fourth section, 'Reviews'. (The second and third contain 'Broadcasts' and 'Forewords' respectively.) Larkin's repudiation of modernism, something fundamentally international, is seen in his celebration of 'the spirit of Betjeman' as 'backwards, downwards and inwards'.

Larkin writes of the Thirties that 'the architecture of the age was Nuremberg, its heroes the working class', artfully and dishonestly conflating the two sides of the decade's ideological struggle to extol Betjeman's uniqueness. Larkin was among the few serious critics to praise Betjeman, however, and his pieces about him stand up remarkably well.

Along with Betjeman, Tennyson, Hardy, Barbara Pym and Ian Fleming predictably earn Larkin's praise, but the range of his reviewing is impressive. He was enthusiastic about the American poet Randall Jarrell, for instance (the feeling was reciprocated). Equally, it is good to read his praise of Gavin Ewart, a poet currently out of fashion and largely out of print. Larkin's review should help to revive Ewart's reputation - even if he doubted Ewart's chances of lasting.

One reservation Larkin expresses is that 'the sex Ewart is defending, or claiming the right to express, so often seems not a lawless passion or a sensual tenderness, but the familiar fetishes of tits, knickers, pubic hair and so on. It may be argued that for most men this is what sex means much of the time, but it is hard to feel high-minded about it'. 'Most men' almost winks at us. Larkin refers to John Cowper Powys's 'auto-erotic fantasies fuelled by sadistic pornography' as part of the sexual range the Powys brothers displayed. He does not refer to the corner of his own imagination which was peopled by flagellant lesbian schoolgirls.

Larkin's fantasies, of course, enabled him to evade emotional entanglement, while letting him indulge the tethered violence which was so important a part of his make-up. That violence was also expressed in his Thatcher-loving, wog-bashing letters. It is astonishing to read that Larkin found Evelyn Waugh's letters 'shocking'. He quotes two racist sentences, then says that they may be 'part of Waugh's epistolary irony, and understood as such by his correspondents'.

This is now the standard defence of Larkin's own correspondence. 'But,' Larkin continues, the letters 'support Claire Luce's quick judgment that he had "no heart" '. Larkin's self-contradictory will ensured that his letters would be published while appearing to be disowned: he knew more of his own heartlessness than he let on. The same will is soon to permit the publication of his pornographic fictions. He wanted us to know him better, I suspect, and to like him less: his self-loathing ran that deep.

W.H. Auden's later poetry is a recurrent topic here. Larkin keeps insisting that it deteriorated seriously after Auden's move to the United States in 1939. His vehemence suggests an underlying anxiety. Larkin particularly valued his own lines:

Life is first boredom, then fear Whether or not we use it, it goes, And leaves what something hidden from us chose, And age, and then the only end of age.

'We are lived by powers we pretend to understand,' Auden wrote in May 1939. The gloomily determinist Larkin could have accepted that, but not the existentialist belief in the absolute freedom of human will to which Auden soon turned. Auden's later thought, and his ease in creation, struck at the roots of Larkin's costive pessimism. As about his father, the war, his sexuality and his private opinions, Larkin was unable to come clean. This remains a fascinating and enjoyable book. Its silences cry out, but that is part of what it means to be a writer. Or, rather, to have invented, in painful secrecy, the self that writes.